Praha!

So I finally made some friends and went with them to Prague for the weekend! We left Friday night at around 11 pm. We were supposed to leave a bit earlier (like at 10 pm) but they were late and stuff. It sucked since it was so cold outside but oh well. So the bus ride was about 7 hrs. since it made stops in Berlin and Dresden, and we arrived in Prague at about 5 in the morning.

The first day we spent mostly wandering around and seeing the sights, checking out museums and places and whatnots. And, that's also what we did the next day. On the first night we found a place to get Czech food (which is not surprisingly a lot like German food,) and on the second night we ended up eating Chinese. And a note, Chinese restaurants seem to be the same everywhere! Seriously...

As for the hostel, what an enormous step outside my comfort zone... so we booked a 6-bed room, since we had 6 people. Makes sense? Obviously not... So turns out it was a 6-bunkbed mixed room. So we had to share the room with 6 other guys and girls. Some notable members were two girls from UCLA and a Spanish guy with a really high pitched voice. Anyway, I was just glad that at least the showers were partitioned off.

We ended the trip by hanging out in the commons area of the hostel we stayed at until it was time to go to our bus (which was around 12 am.)

Ok, picture time! That's what you really want, isn't it? Here you go:

Weekend in Praha

And this concludes my thoughts on my Prague trip, or maybe I'll post more pictures as they become available to me, who knows...

My Last Days in Stuttgart

So right now I've been in Magdeburg for about two weeks, but now I'm going to talk about my last week at Stuttgart.

So for my last week in Stuttgart, I didn't really go to language class and took that opportunity to visit all my favorite spots on last time and to make some stops and the places I hadn't visited yet. I feel that my adventures will be best told through yet another photo album:

Last Days in Stuttgart

So yeah as you can see I started out with the art museums then worked my way around to the various places. Overall I feel I had a good last week.

die Friseurin

Today I finally got the nerve to go and seek a hair cut. All my life I had been going to the same stylist (who is very service-oriented and named "Mom"), but now that I'm out in the world on my own, I had to find someone else to do it. So I google.de-mapped some places and found one that I thought seemed decent. Well of course I ventured off to find it and couldn't, so I was a bit more than agitated. While finding my way back to the S-bahn, I passed a different hair place and thought it looked OK enough. So I went in and got my hair cut, well more like just trimmed, and it turned out pretty alright actually. Pic. -->

But anyway, there is a point to this story. I had never heard of this kind of place before. They wash and cut your hair, but you dry it yourself. If you have the hair person dry it, then it costs twice as much. To me, I don't think this would pass in the states, but maybe they exist? I have no idea really, but I think it's a good concept though. Instead of cutting time by making a sadder haircut, save time by just not drying it! There ya go, and besides I don't have a problem with it since I usually dry my hair anyway.

So yeah go me for speaking German to hair people and being successful (more or less) with getting what I wanted.

Oh and on a side note, I passed a Middle-Eastern store on the way back, and Turkish delight is very yummy! :)

Thoughts on German food

This week I haven't really done anything exciting, but I did consume a good amount of food, bringing me to todays topic: snacking.

When I think about the snacks here, one name comes to mind: HARIBO!!! Not only do they make the tastiest gummy bears I can think of, they also make a wide assortment of other gummy wonderfulness. Their black licorice wheels are another favorite of mine. While they do sell Haribo brand gummies in the states, don't be fooled into thinking they are the same. The ones in the states are way squishier and for that reason just don't taste as good. This can partially be remedied by sticking those things in a fridge or freezer for a bit, but it's just not the same.

The next obvious thing to talk about would be wurst, but considering how I haven't consumed a single sausage since I've been here, I can't really talk about them.

The bakery. So yeah there are lots of those here. To get an idea as to how many, I'll use an analogy. The bakery density here rivals, if not surpasses, the Starbucks density in Manhattan, so there you go. I don't think you can go down any block really without running into some kind of bakery, which is fine though, since baked things are yummy. I have really come to love this one whole grain bread that's covered in like pumpkin seeds or some other puffy seed that looks like a pumpkin seed but maybe isn't. But I can't think of what else they could be anyway, so bread + pumpkin seeds = a good thing. Also good from the bakeries are their hot fresh Brezels and pastries.

Another thing that they have a lot of here is cheese. And luckily, I also love cheese. Most of my experiences with cheese here have been in the form of mystery on my sandwich. They're good, but then I never know what to go to the store and buy for home consumption. :( I guess this means that I have to improve my German some more so that when I ask the bakery people what kind of cheese is on the sandwich, their response will sound intelligible.

And now we come to my most favorite thing: chocolate! I don't think this really needs much explanation, but Lebkuchen (gingerbread--the soft kind, not the hard cookie kind) covered in dark chocolate reminds me of Christmas and is sooo good. And then there's also how when you go to the grocery store there is almost always a chocolate aisle separate from the candy aisle, 'nuff said.

All this talk about food has made me hungry, so I'm going to go make some spaghetti since that's still the only thing I can actually "cook" right now.

Meersburg & Bodensee

Yesterday we took an excursion to Meersburg, Lake Constance, and the Zeppelin Museum courtesy of the IZ. It was very scenic and pretty. The bus ride was about two hours to get there and three hours to get back. I really like Meersburg; it was a cool old German town. They took a lot of effort to keep the town the way it is with many building restrictions and the like, but I'm glad since it was all cute and pretty. I would rather have stayed there longer and skipped the Zeppelin museum, maybe hang out down by the water some, but I didn't want to pay for my way back, so I stuck with the group. Anyway so I made an album of the trip, so follow the link below!

Meersburg & Bodensee

Things I have noted during the trip:

1. Drinking a half liter of beer really isn't all that bad.
2. Vanilla ice cream (gelato is what they serve in Germany) with strawberry sauce and white chocolate sprinkles is really tasty.
3. old people : tour buses :: flying insects : bright lights
4. Dark chocolate with the chili mixed into its dark chocolate cream filling = very very very happy Catherine.
5. Germans are tall, and I am not.

So that was that. Today was boring since all I did was go to class and then later try to cook dinner. It didn't turn out very well...

Braueriefest

So today I actually left my room and ventured some more into Stuttgart. It was me, Massey, Mike, and Constance (not a Rose nerd.) So we started off with the flea market, which was pretty cool. They had a lot of neat stuff, but considering how I am moving in like two weeks, buying crap I don't really need probably not the best idea. Next we moved on to thrift shops. Most of them were closed since it was Saturday, but the ones that were open seemed to be mostly junk. After that we wandered around for a bit and then happened upon an Asian market somewhere down by Schwabstrasse. I was so excited because they had Indonesian food! So this means now that I'm going to attempt in the next couple of days to cook real food. The things I will try to cook will be nasi goreng (fried rice, and not too difficult I'm hoping) and opor ayam (this involves cooking poultry, so this is potentially scary for me.) So we'll see how that goes, more updates on that later...

So anyway later we needed lunch. So we found the Braueriefest, and we got free beer. Maybe because it was free it tasted pretty OK to me, but I drank all of mine and didn't have the urge to empty my stomach into the nearest waste receptacle. Go me! But yea we got three different beers, one was a pilsner, one was some sort of other beer that was like different and stuff (yup I know absolutely nothing about beer), and the last one was alcohol free. The alcohol free one was all sorts of nasty... So yea there was a terrible band called "Pink Plane Party," and they played a lot of 70's and 80's sadness. But the crepes I had for lunch were pretty tasty. OK pictures. That there to the right is the wall of empty beer bottles that I'm assuming they had gone through during the free beer sessions. And next up we have a picture of happy college students experiencing beer in Germany.

...And that's all I have to say about that for now...

Mos Eisley!

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So today I found the Mos Eisley Cantina of Stuttgart. How friggin' sweet is that??? I didn't get to eat there since they were closed at the time, but I'm going to go back there. And when I go back, they better have some blue milk, or somebody is going to have their ass handed to them. So yea, that was pretty awesome.

Oh! And today I got "controlled" for the first time. Too bad though the Chinese people sitting across from us "forgot" their tickets and had to pay a 20€ fine each, which is lucky for them. The Kontrolleur was nice to them since it's normally 40€ per person if you're caught on the train without a ticket.

And on a finishing rant note, finding jeans here that fit nicely is just as impossible or more impossible than in the states.